The Iron Thorn

26 The Bottomless Room

AFTER DEAN HAD made a pot of strong coffee, he poured me a mug and followed me into the library. “Feel like an assist, princess?”

“I’d like that,” I said as he helped me onto the ladder. Apparently, we weren’t speaking about what I’d shared with him upstairs, and that suited me just fine.

Dean sneezed when he came through the hatch into the library above. “Dusty as old bones up here.”

“Look for anything about the Folk,” I told him. “Tremaine knows everything about me and I know nothing about them, except that they like to play tricks.”

“And I could have told you that.” Dean flashed me a grin and reached for a book. He stopped, hand fluttering in front of the shelves on the far side of the attic.

I joined him, staring at the gap between the journals and papers, which revealed nothing to my eye except water-stained plaster. “What’s wrong?”

Dean’s eyebrows drew together. “You know there’s another room back here, right?”

I snapped my gaze to his. “What?”

“Another room,” Dean said. “I feel it. Open space, hidden space.” He shook his head, like someone had slapped him. “A place that got lost. I found it.”

Hidden rooms in hidden rooms. Perhaps this room held what I needed to fulfill my bargain with Tremaine.

“There’s got to be a locking lever and a switch here somewhere,” I said. I put my hand on the wood near Dean’s trembling palm. I let my own Weird unfurl, ever so delicately, like letting just a few grains from a handful of sand slip through your fingertips. The switch twitched against my mind, the lock and the wheels all clicking into place with that pressing fullness.

It wasn’t nearly as torturous as when the ghouls had found Cal and me, but it hurt more than enough. After a moment the entire section of wall swung away, ponderous under the weight of its volumes.

“Our own little hideaway,” Dean said. “I think I might like this.”

“Behave yourself,” I said. Abruptly my feet were as unsteady as if we were at sea. I couldn’t be distracted by Dean and what he did to me, even if I wanted to be for the first time ever, with anyone.

Dean’s lighter snapped and the dancing flame sent slivers of bright into the corners of the dingy space beyond. He sucked in a breath, focusing the blue flame on my face. “You’re leaking, doll.”

I felt under my nose with the back of my hand, saw the skin streaked crimson black. “Dammit,” I said, swiping at the blood.

Dean held out his bandanna with his free hand. “Put your head forward until it stops.”

I did as he bade, and he watched me with a calculating eye. “This happen every time?” he said quietly.

I shrugged as best I could with a blood-soaked rag on my face. “I’ll let you know once I’ve used it more than twice,” I told him, muffled. The trickle of red from my nose eventually ceased, and I laid the rag aside. Taking a moment to compose myself, I nodded at Dean.

“Let’s take a look at this hideaway of yours, shall we?” I was relieved that I kept the quiver out of my voice. If this was the result of using the Weird to open a door, what would happen if I tried to stop a jitney or manipulate Graystone’s clockwork in earnest? I didn’t particularly care to think of it at the moment.

“This is something else,” Dean said, as the lighter’s flickering flame caressed the hidden room with fingers of shadow and light.

I spied a worktable, covered with bundles of plants and bell jars of long-dead animal specimens, a ruin of gears and machine parts alongside all the trappings of witchcraft that we’d been warned of by the Proctors—chalk, candles, red string and black, petrified frogs and eyeballs of unknown origin. Enough evidence to earn the owner a stint in the Catacombs that only ended when he was carried out dead. Claiming to believe in this stuff was bad enough. Actually practicing it, even though the Proctors repeated over and over and over that magic was fake and witches were only charlatans, was a death sentence back home.

And it might be here too, though for very different reasons.

“This is some workshop,” Dean said. “I don’t know what your old man was up to, but this isn’t something I’d let get around.”

“I think my life’s complicated enough,” I agreed. I investigated the curio cases and devices scattered about the perimeter of the room. A few I’d seen before, in lanternreels or in my textbooks. A bell-shaped diving helmet with a pair of air filters attached to the front; a hand telescope with a plethora of extra lenses, attached to a pair of goggles and a headband; and a gun-shaped device with a glass bulb soldered to the end. Aether swished back and forth gently inside the barrel, blossoming and folding within the glass.

I started for the cabinet, but Dean curled his fingers around my shoulder. “Could be dangerous.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said. I picked up the goggles and slipped them over my eyes. The lens in place at the moment was blue, and the room jumped into sharp black-and-white relief. I rotated the brass dial on the rim of the hand telescope, and a wavering green-blue lens that picked up Dean as an outline of crimson body heat moved into place, followed by a lens that outlined all of the witchcraft paraphernalia in the workshop in bilious green, wavering like seaweed in a current. My vision bulged as if I were looking through a fish’s eye, throwing me off balance and roiling my stomach until I removed the set from my eyes. The effect wasn’t as bad as the one caused by the goggles Tremaine had given me, but these goggles were definitely something of my father’s design. I’d never seen anything like them.

I smoothed my hair. “These things are incredible,” I said, pulse quickening. Devices, machines—this sort of thing was familiar, and yet exciting, because I had never seen machines like these in Lovecraft. “Want to try?” I asked Dean.

He shook his head with a smile. “Not much scares you, does it, Aoife?”

“Plenty,” I said. “Plenty scares me. But not the dark and what might be in there. I’ve plenty of facts that frighten me more than shadows and spooks.”

“Spooks are spooks for a reason,” Dean said. “I’ve seen a few things that’d straighten your hair.”

I started to tell Dean that the specter of encroaching madness, the ever-present Proctors and knowing that your life had a chronometer attached to it was worse than any ghost tale, but before I could, the world fell away.

The twisting, churning, falling sensation was worse this time, my being stretched thin across too many universes. Dean’s hand slipped from mine, and I heard the flutter of a thousand wings before I landed, upright, in a room lit only by firelight.

“There, now,” Tremaine said. “I did tell you we’d speak again.”

“ ’S not been a week yet,” I panted. “I have more time.”

Dean, mercifully, was with me when I glanced over. He went down on a knee and clutched at his forehead. “What in the frozen starry hell is all this?”

“Dean,” I sighed, “this is Tremaine.”

Tremaine stepped forward and held out his hand to me. “My dear. You may leave the hexenring.” His cold pale eyes locked on Dean. “Your companion, however, stays where he is. He has the sheen of clever wickedness about him.”

“Get bent, paleface,” Dean gritted. His face was bereft of color except for two spots of flame in his cheeks, and sweat marked all the hollows of his face.

“Breathe,” I told him, trying to let him know with my eyes we’d be all right. “It gets better.”

“Hurry along, child,” Tremaine said. “Decades are running through the boy’s fingers while you dawdle. You don’t want to have an old, gray steed in place of a fine yearling when we’re through, do you?”

“I’m not ready to help you,” I insisted. “I’m still learning how to use the Weird.”

“Aoife, I did not bring you to chastise you.” Tremaine let go of my hand as soon as I’d crossed the hexenring. The floor of the room was earthen and white mushrooms sprouted in every corner, phosphorescent in the dim light. It was a haunted place, all shadow and glow. The walls were composed of rushes, sprouting moss that swayed overhead like the sighing of lost souls. The fire itself was purple-tinged and ghostly. The only solid, dead thing in the room was a stone table, with deep grooves in the sides and a depression at one end.

Tremaine passed his fingers against the hollowed spot and gave me a smile so sharp I felt it against my throat. “This is where the head rests during the full moon, you know. There is a hole in the ceiling and in their final moment, one may view the cold fire of our stars.”

“Dreadful machines,” I murmured, my stomach turning over. “That seems to be your hallmark.”

Tremaine’s smile dropped off. “You weren’t defiant last time we spoke. I prefer that.”

“This is what you get,” I said, sticking out my chin. It had started as Dean’s gesture, but I’d adopted it as my own. “You can like it or not. If you hadn’t lied about how much time I had, I might be more inclined to behave.”

Tremaine moved around the table, his image blinking in and out like a faulty lanternreel. One moment he was feet from me, the next he loomed up in my vision and his knuckles connected with my face, a sharp backhand slap that echoed inside the domed room.

I stumbled, felt my head ring from the blow and couldn’t believe Tremaine had actually hit me. Dean rushed at Tremaine, but the Folk held up a pale beringed hand.

“You step over that line, boy, and you will disintegrate like so much dust in a storm. Think before you do it, greaseblood. Think very hard.”

Dean pulled his boot back from the line of toadstools. “All right,” he gritted. “But don’t think I won’t pay you in full for hitting her.”

Tremaine turned his back on Dean like he was no more than a mumbling hobo on a Lovecraft street and pulled me up from my hunched position. “Now that I’ve knocked you sensible, Aoife, you need to listen.” He gripped me hard, hard enough to grind my wrist bones. “Come along. There’s a good girl.”

“Dean …,” I said as Tremaine jerked me toward the long grass-woven curtains that served as the door of the dome. I couldn’t leave Dean. Not here.

“This is not for his ears,” Tremaine said. We passed through the curtain and I gasped to find myself back in the lily field.

Under the cold steel moon, the coffins of the queens glowed. The light writhed and caressed the sleeping visage of the Folk girls, an unearthly borealis that turned the flowers and the faces of the queens into something spectral and transparent, an illusion that flickered and flamed and danced.

“Don’t think I enjoyed that,” Tremaine said. “I do not take pleasure in pain.”

My face throbbed, and I could taste a little blood where my cheek scraped my teeth. I swallowed it and didn’t say anything, just glared and hoped Tremaine would melt under my gaze.

“You’ve used the Weird,” Tremaine said. “But you don’t understand it. I tell you now, what you need for my task can’t be found in the shortsighted journal of a foolish man.”

“My father isn’t foolish,” I said. Cold, yes. Unloving, maybe. But never foolish. Tremaine folded his arms.

“Aoife, with respect: you don’t know the man.”

“Well, either way, I can’t do what you ask,” I muttered stubbornly, even though he was right. “You may as well end me now,” I said, and then outright lied. “I don’t even know if I have a Weird.”

“You do, and it is prodigious,” Tremaine said. “Your gift for lying, less so. I’ve seen your Weird.”

“How …” I liked to think that I’d know when Tremaine was spying on me. With his powdery skin and skeleton-white hair, he wasn’t exactly blending into the landscape.

But perhaps he didn’t need to see me to watch me. I didn’t know the full power of the Folk. I shivered, and rubbed my hands together, tucking them up in my sleeves.

“My eyes venture far,” Tremaine murmured. “Even if my body cannot. In both Thorn and Iron. They are all colors, all shapes. Silent eyes on silent wing.” He was smirking at me, and all at once the memory of shattering window glass and the shriek of the ghouls rushed back.

“You sent that thing after me!” I cried. “In the library. And again in the cemetery!”

Tremaine nodded mildly, polishing one of his bracers with his opposite sleeve. “I did send the strix owl, as incentive to defend yourself with your Weird. I don’t know of any cemetery.”

“You almost killed me,” I snarled. “I could have—”

“The poisoned queens sleep eternal.” Tremaine cut through my words with the sharpness of his tone. “In the old times, the shining times, we would gather at the Winnowing Stone and harness its great bounty to awaken the sleepers from their curse. But now no magic borne of the Thorn Land can wake them. This is the truth. This is the curse.” He turned his gaze from the lilies and the coffins. “It falls to you, Aoife, you and your Weird, to find a way.”

I swallowed hard, trying to keep up the toughness I had started with. “I don’t know what you expect me to—”

He reached out and put a hand on my face, cupping the cheek that he had struck. “There was once a great spark in the races of your world, Aoife. But it has extinguished, gone to ash, all but the barest ember. From the ashes of magic has risen the phoenix of the machine. That is what I seek.”

His fingers tightened on my cheek, diamond chips of nails digging against my skin. “My world is dying, Aoife, and by symbiosis yours is as well. Ours is a sudden and violent cataclysm, and yours is a death spiral into the entropy of reason.” Tremaine’s nails drew blood from my cheek. “You are something never seen before, in the history of your bloodline,” he whispered. “You will rekindle the flame. You will cleanse this insidious plague of science by fire.”

I struggled, but he held fast with the desperate grip of a drowning man. “You will awaken the queens, Aoife. And to free my lands from the shackles of so-called enlightenment, I will do what I must.” He leaned in so that our faces nearly touched. “Forcing a stubborn child to do her chores is the least of my reach, Aoife. Continue to defy me and see what else I can send to find you.”

“You’re hurting me,” I whispered. What Tremaine was asking me to do was impossible—my father had said so—but I had a feeling that objections would just get me slapped again. And Tremaine seemed sincere, even his anger born more from the desperation in his eyes than any deceit that I could see.

Releasing his grip, Tremaine wiped the blood away from my skin with the tips of his fingers. “Don’t force me to hurt you worse to convince you of your importance to me, Aoife. Break the curse. Bring light back to both of our worlds.”

“I can’t …” Tears started, stinging the cuts and mingling with my blood. Have you ever seen blood under starlight, Aoife? When it’s black? “I can barely control it,” I said, thinking of the great pressure on my head when I’d slain the ghouls, the pain and cold that had nearly stopped my heart. How was I supposed to break a curse? I didn’t even know how to make my Weird respond unless I was about to be eaten or clawed to death.

“Aoife,” Tremaine sighed. “You have spirit and a certain fey quality that reminds me of my own daughters, may they travel through the Mists unharmed. But these are the darkest hours of my people. If you confound me, you will not appreciate the consequences.”

I was trembling all over, from cold and from plain-faced, ugly fear, but I managed to keep my voice steady, because I was keeping my vow to not show weakness to Tremaine. “And if I do, and still refuse?”

“Why, then,” Tremaine said softly, “the terms still stand: I will come to Graystone and forfeit the lives of Dean and dear Cal. And you will never know Conrad’s fate, and both of us will live to see the end of our species’ existence.”

I looked back at the hut, imagining Dean aging by the year inside the hexenring. Imagining him or Cal lying dead on the library floor by Tremaine’s hand. Of never seeing Conrad again and only having an inkling of his fate through my madness dreams. I shook my head to clear the images.

“Well?” the pale man purred.

I nodded, unable to look into his stone-sculpted face for one more moment. “I’ll do it.”

Tremaine smiled again. I didn’t want to see it, but I could sense it—his thin lips pulled taut, his razor teeth exposed in victory, like a wolf’s.

“I knew you would,” he said. He reached into his coat and drew out a brass bell, muting the clapper with his thumb. “Use this when you’ve done as I asked. Until then … I hope we do not have to meet again. I grow weary of scolding you.”

Tremaine took my shoulder and led me back to the hut and the hexenring where Dean waited. He pushed me over the ring of toadstools and I shoved the brass bell into my pocket. The last thing I saw before the ring closed was Tremaine watching me, the wolf’s smile still on his face.